


Imaginary Friends

by unorigelnal (jayburding)



Category: Batman (Comics), DCU (Comics)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-10
Updated: 2012-11-10
Packaged: 2018-02-08 20:37:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1955361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jayburding/pseuds/unorigelnal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dick never liked being alone, but in the last six years he’d had to get used to it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Imaginary Friends

Dick never liked being alone, but in the last six years he’d had to get used to it. At first, when it was him and Bruce and Alfred, he coped, though the aching emptiness of the manor and Bruce’s enduring silences were often indistinguishable from loneliness. It was still better than the home, where all the kids his age were just waiting for the birthday where they stopped mattering. Their creeping hopelessness was horrifying.

Dick was falling over himself to be friendly when Babs was welcomed into the fold, but she seemed to find him irritating more than anything, like the annoying kid brother no one asked for. Still, it was a relief to have someone to talk to, even if that person just tolerated him because she liked his  ~~employer~~  mentor.

Eventually they got to a point where they could be considered friends, in a very lopsided, only in costume kind of way. There was even the hint of a potential something more. He never got up the courage to try though, both for fear of losing the one friend he had on a gamble, and because he was never quite certain if that was all there was to it. Babs really was the only friend he had.

Babs hung up her cape before he found the nerve. She went back to her life, and he went back to mouthing off at criminals while wearing bright colours, wondering if he could quit even had he wanted to. Would he even last that long?

He had just enough time to readapt to his abbreviated attempt at family when he was out on his own again, wearing a symbol that had little to do with his new life and everything to do with a life that never happened, a life he’d buried in a plot in the manor grounds. It should have felt like a tribute, but instead it weighed like a tombstone round his neck, like the one Bruce wore when he donned the cowl.

There was a new Robin in place before Dick had his Blüdhaven patrol routes memorised. The first time they’d met Jason was suspicious of Dick, clearly threatened by his predecessor. The negative feelings were mutual.

Dick wanted to laugh every time Jason called him Golden Boy. Bruce had given Jason a name that wasn’t his to give. Bruce had made him Robin, and given him a home at the manor. He’d put Dick in an orphanage, and given him a part time job at the manor. Golden boy indeed.

Still, Dick had to own up to the fact that none of it was Jason’s fault, and there was no confronting Bruce about it, because you didn’t talk to Bruce about feelings. He scraped together his courage, smothered his frustration, and tried to be a big brother.

“If you need anything, Little Wing, you just let me know, ok? Anything at all. I’ll be there, I promise.”

They were bad at being brothers, they didn’t know how to be, but they worked it out in the moments Dick scavenged between patrol and training. They sniped as much as they got on, but it was still so good to have someone. Dick even snuck a hug from his brother once, and Jason didn’t smack him for it, so he considered it a win.

Dick wasn’t there for Babs’ encounter with the Joker. He wasn’t there for those first weeks of recovery, the beginning of physiotherapy. They didn’t know each other out of costume, not really, and he couldn’t do worse than turning up at her window in his mask, flaunting his health. The “on a mission” excuse only stretched so far before it became a blatant untruth.

He wrote letters he never sent and watched from a distance, because that’s what cowards did, finding missions to take him away when the guilty lump caught in his throat and choked him.

Jason died half a world away while Dick was working another case that kept him away from home. He returned to a five day old message on his answering machine, the only time Jason had ever called him for help.

_“Hi, Dick, it’s Jason. Are you there? You said anything, and, well, this is big. Really big. Bruce won’t get it, but you might, I think. Maybe. Just call me back, ok… I need your help.”_

Dick sobbed on the floor while the message played again.

He tried harder with Tim, haunted by the message that he never quite brought himself to delete, but it was clear early on that Tim didn’t need him. The kid was already an Olympic class gymnast, a computer genius, a budding detective… Bruce might have been able to teach him something, but he was practically on par with Dick from the start. He knew it too. Maybe that was the worst part. Bruce had had things to say about Tim before he’d even started training the new Robin that Dick had never heard from him during his entire tenure.

Dick remembered Jason calling him Golden Boy, and wondered what Jason would have thought of Bruce’s newest acquisition. The perfect kid or the guy who couldn’t be there the one time his brother needed him. Looked like they had a new contender for the title.

He found time for Tim as often as he could, but Tim only really had eyes for Bruce. Bruce who, for all the trouble it had taken Dick to get a smile, had admiring words for his newest Robin from the start. Who yet again had given a stranger a home at the manor where Dick hadn’t made the cut.

Dick tripped over his tongue when he was around Tim, because those bitter facts sat at the back of his mind every time they met, and he probably would have disappointed Tim if his little brother had had any expectations to begin with. He tried, and he failed, and that was about right for Dick at this stage.

It was too soon when Tim was out on his own, working under the name he’d given himself with a lot more success than Dick had. They rarely made contact after that, but Dick had had so little to offer Tim when he was Robin he was hardly surprised that Tim had no use for him now.

Dick didn’t know when things had gotten so bad. It didn’t even occur to him until he returned home after that night’s patrol and was floored by how empty it was. Always had been. Bruce never visited. Neither did Tim. Jason had never come here.

He crawled into bed still in his costume, tucked the duvet around himself and held it there as tight as it would go. It almost felt like a hug. Almost.

_Just like mum. Like dad. Like Jason._  But he couldn’t recall them properly, not in the way that would give him back the feeling of their arms around him. It was just fabric and feathers, pulled tight enough to split, and the phantom touch of another person around him that he couldn’t quite conjure into something more.

That night he was still lonely, but he tried again the next night, and the one after. And maybe there was something about the early hours, when he was exhausted from patrol and the half light made everything strange and grey, that was enough to trick him that someone else was there. Someone to put their arms around him as he drifted off, faceless and fragile, but all his.

The trick was good enough to let him sleep.


End file.
